Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini: Book Review
Reading Matt Margini’s book made me terribly sad, because I was supposed to write it. Or, more accurately, a book like it.
I’ll explain that sentence later I promise. For now I wanna start on Red Dead Redemption.
When I think of the year 2010, I don’t remember anything vividly other than playing videogames. This is a tad disconcerting given the fact I was coming out of a two year slump following graduating from High School and about to start college. I was a myopic and clinically depressed dude with long hair(nothing’s changed) who had spent most of high school coasting by while being effectively nothing and nobody and when I graduated in 2008 I spent two years in my parents house watching movies, listening to every CD I could get my hands on, writing a few novels that were never published, and also dealing with self-induced hallucinations that were, putting it mildly, not good for my general mental health. This is to say my high school experience sucked and left me a tad busted up. Video Games provided solace and psychological balms in my life(maybe you could call them healing potions), and it didn’t hurt that two of the games I played the most during that time were Alice: Madness Returns and Red Dead Redemption.
As a quick aside, I note for the record that it’s criminal that I haven’t written anything about Alice Madness Returns at this point in my life, especially given the context of the previous paragraph. But dang it this is a book review and nobody’s written a book about Alice: Madness Returns…yet.
Red Dead Redemption is an action adventure, western, open-world, role playing game released for the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 in North America 18 May 2010, and PAL regions 21 May 2010. It was developed by Rockstar San Diego Inc. and published by Rockstar Inc. Though derisively referred to by some critics and players as Grand Theft Horse, Red Dead Redemption has, since it was released, become a mainstay on lists of greatest videogames ever made and even a decade after it’s release still has players and a dedicated following ready to exemplify it’s strengths as a work of digital interactive media.
It’s also, fun fact, one of the best Westerns ever made.
I’ll explain that sentence later too.
Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini is book #24 in the Boss Fight Books series, and, for whatever reason, one that I put off reading for a while. Part of the reason is simply the sheer number of books I want to read, drawings I want to make, and videogames I want to play. Also, I have a girlfriend apparently and she, for some reason, wants to spend time with me. Whatever the reason for my abstention, I decided to finally tackle it and am pleased to find Margini's book was incredibly well written and revealed the demonstration of his conviction as a fan of videogames and Red Dead Redemption.
Though his prose is largely analytical, any casual reader of the book is sure to come away with a deeper appreciation, not only of Red Dead Redemption, but the genre of the Western itself. While breaking down the conventions of the game and how Red Dead Redemption sought to find itself within the body of the Western genre, Margini regularly cites West of Everything by Jane Thompkins an academic text which examines the Western as a genre, while also providing historical background to its history. Margini’s book tries to connect the story of John Marsten to the larger genre noting its unique role in the zeitgeist and cultural myth of the United States.
And, it’s important to note, Margini succeeds fantastically in all these endeavors.
One the most important, and arguably obvious elements of Red Dead Redemption is its violence. It is a Rockstar game after all, and that production company has not shied away from regularly building a brand around videogames that contain violence and violent peoples for major plot points. In one passage midway through the book Margini observes how Red Dead Redemption leaves a distinct intellectual impression upon the player, while at the same time observing the conventions of the Western genre that’s being subverted all while tackling the violence in the game. He writes:
Red Dead does many things with violence. It makes you feel good; it makes you feel dirty. It makes killing hard, or at least harder to stomach than other shooters; it makes killing easy, in keeping with a world where industrialism is making all the sins of humanity easier to mass-produce. It takes the crisp action figures of the older Westerns–black hat versus white hat, in a duel at high noon–and melts them to gooey sticky tar that gets all over your shoes. But the game's more powerful and enigmatic effect is simply the way it makes you ask yourself: What are you doing? What are you working toward, as you move from cover to cover and ping yet another bandit with a bullet to the head? What are you becoming as you merge with the machine? (146).
I will admit that a lingering impression of Red Dead Redemption is marveling at the fact that John Marsten kills, like, a ton of dudes. I don’t have specific numbers (and you have no idea how painful it is writing that sentence unironically), but the sheer mass of human beings left shot and killed across the plains of Armadillo alone are enough to warrant even the most bloodthirsty carnivore to take a moment and consider the loss of life. Granted, not every mission in the game results in John drawing his pistol and leaving a river of dead bloody bodies behind him. Some missions are simply herding cattle (these missions, fun fact, suck), some missions simply have him hunting (these missions don’t suck), and some missions involve him racing horses or carts (these missions, absolutely suck). Violence is at the heart of Red Dead Redemption and as the game progresses the number of people that John will shoot and kill will only increase. Some players won’t mind this because gunplay and murder simulation are what they’re there for in the first place.
I have to admit, I didn’t think anything negative about all of this killing when I played the game. My dad watched John Wayne westerns all the time and those films always involved killing dudes, sometimes even small armies of dudes.
Violence is, and always has been part of the genre of the Western and Margini observes this again and again as he considers each level and side-quest of the game. And all of this violence eventually forces him to consider the actor behind this bloodshed, namely John Marston himself. As Margini considers the typical protagonist of previous westerns he shifts his focus to John writing:
Marston’s a little like that. He isn’t really a force of good who cleanses the land of evil; instead he inflicts sin upon the sinners, ruin up on the ruined, death upon the dead. He isn’t necessarily evil, but he’s part of evil’s infrastructure compounding–rather than eliminating–the suffering of the places he visits. And the game implies pretty strongly that on some level, he prefers the constant agonistic struggles of frontier gunmanship to the quiet boredom of family life. Or at least he can’t live without those struggles […]. (113).
One of the impressions that doesn’t shake from someone who's played Red Dead Redemption, or at least what hasn’t shaken from me, is the impression of John himself. Throughout the game I’m navigating him from place to place, region to region, npc to npc and in every encounter he comes away appearing to be the most level-headed or at least the most confident. John is a man who is driven by his conviction to get back to his family and while doing so he projects a bravada and apathy to the sheer absurdity of the people he encounters. Whether it’s Abraham Reyes the revolutionary who is crafting visions of grandeur, West Dickens the snake oil salesman who is constantly scheming up the next scam, or Seth the Grave robber who is…well, Seth, John leaves the interaction as if he is, not better, but more aware of the reality of the world than these people he’s often using for his own benefit.
Western protagonists by design were often loners who skirted the lines of society for supposedly higher purposes because it was through their individuality that they found purpose and an actual drive to exist. Death was, and is, never far from the protagonists’ world because they are sure to meet death out to those foolish to cross them, and likewise death is inevitable for them as well.
Looking at all this, if I had played Red Dead Redemption once all the way through and never played the game again, I probably would believe that John is the “hero” of the story. But as Margini, and countless other writers have effectively pointed out, this is a fallacy that’s easily broken.
Looking at the Mexico chapter (arguably the best portion of the game (not to mention my favorite section (except for that one mission where you have to take Louisa’s sister to the pier))) Margini once again explores John’s moral ambiguity. Setting the character against the political idealist of Louisa is a beautiful chance to see how John was crafted narratively. Margini writes:
That’s the tone of Red Dead’s Mexico chapter. At no point does the game want you to question Luisa’s conviction, or question Marston’s decision to fight with her against a man Allende, who rapes and kills and burns entire villages to the ground, who “runs this place, like a feudal king,” in the words of Ricketts. But the game overshadows for righteousness with a prevailing sense of futility written into the landscape–those huge, impossible masses that bear down upon the ant-like humans–as well as the body language of Marston himself. He’s the outsider, the third-party, blocking our ability to plug into the games feeble scenes of political action. He’ll never be more than a hired hand, and he’ll never let you start thinking that any of this shit will work. […] As the rebels cheer, Marston just stands there, silently turns his back, and walks away. The effect is sort of like dramatic irony: when you know something that characters in a story don’t. But what you know is bleak, overwhelming. It’s not just that the game doesn’t let you pick sides. It doesn’t want you to believe anything. (160).
Idealism is difficult to find in just about any Rockstar videogame, largely because of the particular branding that company has established after literal decades of videogame production. Words like sarcastic and nihilist are often thrown about by videogame critics who decide to tackle the various stories and side-quests players are sure to find in Rockstar Games. And to be fair, Red Dead Redemption doesn’t shy away from this tone either. John’s almost always got a quick, albeit mean-spirited retort to just about anything and everything he encounters, and there’s no shaking the fact that the man obviously is living with some sort of inverse sense of superiority. John’s a man who thinks he knows, and probably actually does know, that the world will break idealists just as quickly as it entertains them.
And this is because John lives in a world that’s dramatically becoming controlled by interests, much like the players themselves.
Red Dead Redemption is an open world videogame, meaning that players can follow the main storyline, but they’re also given a virtual “sandbox” where they can explore and experiment with the tools they’ve been given. I can ride my horse from one side of the map to the other, I can engage in duels, I can catch wild horses and tame them, I can hunt animals and sell their pelts for cash, I can play poker, I can do the “strangers'' side missions which range from helping a woman find her lost husband to saving a man’s horse from kidnappers, I can hunt for treasure, I can watch cartoon movies, and I can shop for better guns to make killing animals and people easier. When the game was released all of these opportunities seemed endless, and Margini is keen to point out that this experience is designed to entertain us, and to distract us. Margini writes:
Open world games are built to help us escape from this oppressive, cramped reality. It’s too bad that most of them inevitably make it worse by revealing that they’re for you. They’re cheap pandering simulations of freedom. They’re outgrowths of the infrastructure state. (61).
Working a public service job this passage rang a little too painful for me, mostly because it resonated. I love my job despite the headaches it brings, but no matter how much passion I may or may not have, nothing changes the fact that I spend most of my time continually serving other people’s interests. I virtually live 40 hours a week in a brick building helping other people, when my own needs and wants are squished into the few precious hours I have outside of work that don’t involve sleep.
And even that time can be quickly occupied by private and public interests that demand my attention, money, and time.
Playing open world videogames is fun, but their sheer size hides the fact that they are games as much as they are corporate products to capture my attention, and keep me purchasing further simulations of freedom.
The troubling reality that Marini observes here is, why does the player buy into this mentality? Why do they make this choice?
Throughout Red Dead Redemption there are cutscenes that begin to reveal why John is doing most of what he’s doing. The player finds out that government agents (at the behest of an up-and-coming politician who promised to reform the Western territories of the United States) have taken John’s family hostage and have threatened them. John must locate and capture (or kill) the members of his former gang for the government. Failure to do so will result in the harm and/or death of his family. That means even at his most altruistic or selfish moments, John’s actions on this path are defined by the needs of outside interests that will continue to subjugate him and reduce his agency, and the player playing the game is participating in that while outside interests influence their decision to play the game.
Put another way: John’s a dude in a simulation who’s being played by the dudes who are trying to take a break from the knowledge that they’re being played by dudes who control just about every aspect of that dude's life.
It’s flipping heavy dude…but that’s life.
And on the note of life, I should probably discuss death and failure.
Anyone who’s played Red Dead Redemption to the very end knows that John Marsten dies, shot down by the agents who used him. The scene is graphic and painful to watch, but what’s most memorable is how it resists any cinematic grandiosity. John dies a bloody death and that’s it. What’s remarkable is how even before this death sequence, anytime the player dies before this climactic moment the death is presented just as simply. Margini notes this when he writes:
And yet, despite all the morbid pageantry of the Strange Man, the game’s tumbling bodies and cumbersome gameplay convey a much less theatrical message. Like the Western, the most cinematic genre of all time, the game wants to remind us that death will not be cinematic; it will be small and humiliating and deeply physical. It will be, in the end, a matter of sheer matter, shere logistics, and maybe even shere chance, like a wagon wheel crunching over the belly of a hapless drunk. Or like a cowboy shot down in the middle of town, he barely knows, fighting for a cause he doesn’t believe in, wondering when, if ever, his body will get to rest. (79).
Death in videogames has often been the sign of failure, and I’ve written a review of Jesper Juul’s book The Art of Failure which provides far more nuance on this topic(Juul’s book I mean(my review is just about his book)). What’s important for Margini’s book is the way it manages to contextualize that failure as both a tribute to the western, and observe its hopelessness. It’s remarkable and frustratingly easy to stumble into death in Red Dead Redemption. Heck, just riding my horse in the wrong damn area is almost certain to trigger the cougar who’s loud squeal is usually heard right as the beast is on me. But again and again whether it’s a stray bullet, falling off a roof, or losing a duel, death can become so meaningless, and when John is left bleeding out in front of the barn it only heightens that sense of futility.
I’ve been skirting around a thought the entire time I’ve been composing this review, and it’s the thought that I addressed at the beginning of this essay: I didn’t enjoy reading Margini’s book. But it’s important to note in the same breath (or lack thereof since this is written rather than spoken aloud) that that sentiment is no reflection on the quality of the book itself.
You should read Margini’s book.
Like you should read all the books in the Boss Fight Book Series.
The book made me sad because I was, at one point in my life, a graduate student who was slowly working towards the daunting task of composing and publishing a Master's Thesis, and my subject was going to be the American Western novels of the early 20th century (with an emphasis on queer theory). I spent hundreds of hours reading Western novels, and academic books about Western novels. I scoured databases for anything and everything about Western novels. I bought (and still own) a copy of West of Everything by Jane Thompkins, the book Margini regularly quotes in his book. I prepared an annotated bibliography, a thesis proposal, and even wrote a 25 page essay as part of a guided individual study as a precursor to the actual writing of the Thesis itself.
Everything was ready to go.
And then the professor who was going to be my thesis advisor announced that she was retiring.
There were a host of reasons why, but the main one was because her daughter passed away the year before and she was intellectually, psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally finished with her career.
I completely understood, and I wanted her to be happy.
I graduated in 2016 with a master degree in English, but almost a decade later I still perceive a tremendous sense of failure for not writing my thesis.
And reading Margini’s book was only more salt in the wound. The dude straight killed it and page after page after page was only more evidence that here was a man who had ingested Red Dead Redemption, the discourse of the Western, and how death and failure permeates just about every part of this videogame and the genre itself. And it only further reminded me of my own perceived (and real) failure.
I wasn’t sure whether or not to include this personal background in this review. In fact I struggled with whether or not to completely remove it from this essay. Ultimately I decided to keep it in because my failure to achieve something with my writing seemed to perfectly mirror (on a personal level) John’s failure to escape his past and make something of his life that wasn’t violent or selfish.
This morbid reflection does serve a purpose, because Margini’s book is an incredible testament to videogame studies, as well as analysis of one of the most important genres of art. Red Dead Redemption is a complex videogame that managed to resonate past the initial skepticism that it would just be “Grand Theft Horse.” It’s a videogame about failure, power, death, hopelessness, and the perpetuation of violence in a society that damns it as much as it capitalizes upon it. In the face of all of this Margini manages to find the beauty in the game and leaves the reader reflecting on the notions of freewill and whether or not they ever really manage to find it and keep it.
Like John Marsten, most of us are bound for failure. But that failure will just lead to the next side mission, and hopefully this one won’t involve cannibals or dudes who are a little too enamored with their horse.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
1.6.2025
You can grab a copy of Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini by following the Link below:
Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini – Boss Fight Books
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